Hooper finished dressing and threw his extra clothes in a suitcase. Then he sat down on the bed and gave their guns a final check. They had a .410 gauge shotgun with a sawed-off barrel and two .38 revolvers. Each would carry a revolver; in addition Madigan would handle the shotgun while Hooper collected the money in the bank. Hooper also had a little .25 automatic he carried in his hip pocket as an extra precaution. That was his hole card, his kicker, in case somebody got the drop on them; not even Madigan knew he had it.
“Hey, snap it up!” he yelled to Madigan in the bathroom.
The younger man came in, drying his face with a hotel towel. “All set and ready to get going,” he said.
“There’s your artillery,” Hooper told him, strapping his own shoulder holster in place. “Are you sure everything’s set in the cabin?”
“I told you, Sam, it’s all ready. I made a final check last week. There’s five hundred bucks worth of food laid in; a six-hundred gallon tank of fuel oil; a radio, four decks of cards, about a thousand magazines I got secondhand in the city; and we got checkers, dominos, parchesi — everything but a broad, an’ I could have arranged that, too, if you’d let me.”
“Sure, sure,” said Hooper, “that’s all we’d need. We’ll be at each other’s throats soon enough without having a dame to fight over. You don’t know how it is being cooped up with the same guy day after day.”
Madigan smiled. “We’ll make it, Sam. I know we will. And when it’s all over we’ll have—”
“I know, I know,” Hooper interrupted, “we’ll have money to burn. Come on, let’s get going or spring’ll be here before we even get started.”
Madigan got into his holster and rolled the shotgun up in newspaper. They both put on heavy Mackinaws, fur caps and rubber overshoes. Then they got their luggage and went downstairs to check out.
The bank opened at ten. Five minutes later Hooper and Madigan pulled up outside and parked. They were driving a four-year-old coupe with heavy-duty snow chains on the rear tires. Getting out, they ducked their heads against the windblown snow and crossed the sidewalk to the bank entrance.
There were six people inside; three tellers, the manager, his secretary and one customer. Madigan remained just inside the door, folding the paper back from the barrel of the shotgun so they could all see, what it was.
“Don’t anybody move!” Hooper ordered, leveling his .38. “This is a holdup!” His gaze swept across the three men in the teller cages. “If an alarm goes off, so does that shotgun, understand? Everybody just stand or sit right where you are and look down at the floor!”
When they were all very still, with Madigan moving the shotgun slowly back and forth in an arc that covered the whole room, Hooper slipped the .38 into his pocket and from under his coat drew out a large canvas bag which he quickly unfolded. He hurried behind the railing and methodically emptied the tellers’ cages of all currency. Then he stepped over to the bank manager’s desk and pulled the man to his feet roughly. “Get that vault open!” he ordered coldly.
The big thick outer door of the vault was already standing open. The manager fumbled with a ring of keys to open the barred inner door. When he finally got it unlocked, Hooper pushed him inside and made him sit in a corner while he systematically looted the bank’s reserve safe. Looks pretty good, he thought, as he stuffed the sack with bundles of tens and twenties and a few stacks of fifties and hundreds.
Finished, he stepped back out and snapped, “All right, everybody into the vault! Come on, move!” He glanced at the big clock on the wall as the other five people filed into the vault. They had been in the bank about seven or eight minutes, Pretty good time, he thought.
Hooper slammed the barred door and locked everyone in the vault. “Take a look,” he said to Madigan, hurrying toward the front door. Madigan peered out at the street; he saw nothing but swirling snow. “Looks okay,” he told Hooper.
“All right, let’s go!”
Madigan folded the newspaper back over the shotgun barrel, tucked it under his arm and opened the front door. Hooper stepped past him out of the bank and went directly to the car; Madigan followed him, closing the door gently behind him.
In the car, Madigan tossed the shotgun on the rear seat and started the motor. Hooper kept the sack of money between his knees, his revolver ready on top of it. The windshield wipers threw the loose snow away, giving them each a picture of the street up ahead. It was nearly deserted. Madigan guided the car slowly away from the curb and down the street.
Five minutes later they were out of town and approaching the curve where the highway began its winding descent to the lowlands.
“How’s it look?” Madigan asked excitedly, nodding toward the sack of money.
“Pretty good, I think,” said Hooper. “Looked like maybe fifty or sixty grand.”
Madigan grinned and went back to concentrating on the road. Where the highway curved downward, they turned off into a gravel road almost hidden by the snow. Their chains crunched noisily and caught and the car lumbered up a slight incline. As they gradually moved upward from the highway, Hooper looked back and saw fresh snow already beginning to fill their tracks.
Fifteen minutes later they reached a ridge where the road leveled off momentarily. Madigan shifted to neutral and pulled on the brake. Hooper took a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment and they got out. Taking turns with the glasses, they looked back down the mountain. The first section of their tracks leading off the highway were now completely covered and there was a fresh layer of unmarked snow on the highway itself.
“Perfect,” said Madigan. “Just like I told you, huh, Sam? First snowfall is always heavy.”
“Just like you told me, kid,” Hooper admitted. He turned his gaze upward. “How long will it take us to get to the cabin?” “About three hours, from the looks of the snow.”
Hooper turned back to the car. “Well, let’s get going.”
It was nearly two in the afternoon when the car pulled the last steep grade and made the top ridge. They were high up now, in a primitive part of the great mountain range where the sky looked strangely close to them, where there was nothing visible except snow-covered pine trees, where the air was exhaustingly thin, the cold sharp and painful.
Hooper looked back down the road. “Are you sure nobody can follow us up here?”
Madigan shook his head emphatically. “By the time the snow stops, this road and everything around it will be in drifts up to eight feet deep. And it’ll stay like that until the spring thaw. It would be impossible for a car to even go down, much less come up.”
Hooper looked around at the white wasteland on all sides of them. “Where’s the cabin?” he asked.
“Just up ahead.”
The car moved through snow already deep across the rutted, narrow, little road, and crawled slowly around a thick group of trees into a small clearing. There, with three feet of snow drifted up against it, sat the little cabin.
“Home sweet home,” said Madigan as he drove up as close as he could and cut the motor. They got out of the car.
“We’ll have to dig our way in, looks like,” said Hooper.
“Yeah.” Madigan opened the trunk and took out two hand shovels.
“How’s that work?” Hooper asked, indicating the large fuel storage tank mounted on a raised wooden platform next to the cabin.
“There’s a line running into the cabin,” Madigan explained. “It’s got a regular tap like a water faucet. We use the fuel oil for our lanterns, for the stove and for the heater.”